Writing » Topical Writing
A Milestone Passed: Brief Thoughts On AI’s Increasingly Convincing Simulation of Humanness

¡AI Caramba!: A Milestone Passed: Brief Thoughts On AI’s Increasingly Convincing Simulation of Humanness

Oct. 11, 2024

Those who've spoken to me about it know that I, through much firsthand experience, call myself "a huge AI enthusiast and skeptic". Generative AI is an amazing technology that has personally benefitted me in ways that were strictly science fiction just a few years ago—but, lot of unmerited claims are made, and a lot of trust put in it that isn't really justified by the technology.

But then there's yesterday's article in Ars Technica.

As a technologist, there are times I remember seeing news articles that seemed to me to really show we've passed a technological benchmark, just things I noticed were the first time I saw things take a new step. This article was that.

The background is this: Google has a new AI called NotebookLM that, when fed material, generates a simulated audio podcast of two very stereotypical podcasters discussing it. I…

Workshop » Reference Section
The Encyclopedia Of AI Apologies (now with bonus AI Swearing and Generative Suicide Threats!)

The Emperor's New Code: The Encyclopedia Of AI Apologies (now with bonus AI Swearing and Generative Suicide Threats!)

I've spent so much time fruitlessly trying to get LLMs (Large Language Model chatbots, commonly referred to generically as "AI") to actually help me solve coding problems that I've taken, as a hobby, to collecting screenshots of AI "apologizing". I just wanted a gallery to send a convenient link to people who insist AI is going to replace human programmers. If you're one if those people, tell me what human programmer, even a junior one, wouldn't get fired after even just two or three project assignments ended like these, um, several hundred examples from the last few months alone.

Update: By popular demand, I have included at bottom a bonus gallery of AI swearing and threatening to destroy itself.

Gallery: The Encyclopedia of AI Apologies

Current apology count: 309 AI apologies.

Bonus Gallery: AI Swearing and Suicide Threats

In a recent blog post, a new…

Workshop » Works In Progress » Writing Works in Progress

Insert Clever phrase here: Artificial Stupidity thoughts & references

I write down a lot of thoughts on AI but have never gathered it into a cohesive essay or collection. This is the beginning of loosely collecting my thoughts and saved references for that.

  • On Emergence and actual intelligence: People are talking about current technology, which relies on matching statistical profiles of strings of words, like true intelligence could emerge from it.I look at it this way: AI video generation is getting really impressive. You could feed it tons of video of basketballs bouncing, and pretty soon it would be able to generate videos of basketballs bouncing realistically through all kinds of extraordinary scenarios, because it had seen enough visual, external data to create incredible simulations of how a basketball bounces. It would truly, profoundly have a grasp on how basketballs appear to bounce.And never, in any of that, would it have even a glimmer of a clue as…
Visual Art » Generative Illustrations
Feminine Stochastique

Generative Mystique: Feminine Stochastique

About This Gallery

This gallery deals with the unavoidable stereotypes of femininity that one encounters using some current generative art tools ca. 2024.

Being trained on a society's art, there are two possibilities for generative visual art software: it can hold an unflinching mirror up to that society, including reiterating its existing biases; or its creators can seek to consciously tilt the output to favor what they deem to be better choices, which opens the whole project up to accusations, and let's face it, perhaps the reality, of introducing other biases. The unfortunate truth is that at the time, people never thought to question making art that almost exclusively reinforced certain notions (of femininity, or anything else). They did not consider themselves to be biased. So too, despite the most admirable intentions, it's honestly a valid question whether or not current attempts to right historical wrongs are undoing bias,…

Writing » Topical Writing
About Sexism In The AI Images On This Site

Hey, You Got Your Social Awareness In My AI!: About Sexism In The AI Images On This Site

A number of the AI-generated images on this site contain artistic depictions of nudity, presented in a way that might seem to reasonably suggest some confusion between real artistic or aesthetic value, and what gives some people, perhaps including myself, some level of simple va-va-va-voom visual jollies.

Put simply: there's a lot of images of naked, topless, or scantily-dressed women in some of the image galleries here, but not so many men. Almost none, in fact.

Although it's in several galleries, this is most evident in, say, "Previsions of Johanna", where the many female figures, and only the female figures, all came out either nude, topless, or wearing a low-cut dress, while the male figures are always fully clothed from neck to wrists and ankles. In fact, the lone arguably male figure in that entire set that is wearing a loose tank top, rather than some kind…